Chapter 26 Scars
Chapter Twenty-Six
Scars
She slept the way she did everything else.
Without pretense. One arm curled beneath the pillow, the other draped across her bare stomach, fingers still loosely parted as if reaching for something even in dreams. Her lips were swollen from his mouth, her lashes casting faint crescent shadows over her cheekbones, as the blankets pooled at her waist.
Jack couldn’t look away, enamored by every soft rise and fall of her breathing. He lay on his side, still fully dressed, watching her the way astronomers watch phenomena they know will never repeat.
The fire collapsed to a bed of embers. The fire’s glow would soon be lost against the intruding glow rising from the horizon anyway.
His cum still marked the inside of her thighs. The sight of it should have shamed him. Instead, something carnal and possessive stirred low in his chest, and he despised himself for how much he enjoyed seeing the evidence of his shame there.
It wasn’t enough that he pressed it deeper. Some animal part of him wished to make it permanent.
He was in catastrophic trouble.
This wasn’t infatuation or curiosity. This wasn’t the chemical reaction of adrenaline and proximity. This was something he couldn’t name. She rearranged the composition of him as a man, dismantled every wall he’d spent decades building.
She tasted like absolution and hope, two concepts that scared the hell out of him.
He didn’t understand the hold she had over him, only that he didn’t want to let go. He wanted time to unravel every mystery she held. Time to figure out why he felt so drawn to her.
He wanted to be whole for her.
The thought arrived without permission and lodged between his ribs like shrapnel.
He wanted to be the man who could strip bare without shaking.
The man who could hold her through the night and wake without screaming.
The man who could bury himself inside her and not become a terrified boy pinned beneath the weight of a giant.
He just didn’t know how to become that man. Or if such a man existed beneath the scar tissue and calculated violence that comprised him.
Daisy’s breath shifted, a soft murmur escaping her lips as she turned her face deeper into the pillow.
His chest constricted. She trusted him enough to sleep.
After everything, after the storm, the tears, his confession, and the broken shards of passion he could offer, she somehow closed her eyes and slept.
He didn’t deserve that kind of trust. But God help him, he intended to earn it.
The sky beyond the windows was changing.
He’d been watching it for the better part of an hour, tracking the slow hemorrhage of night as blackness thinned at the horizon, bleeding into a deep indigo, then a ribbon of violet that crept along the tree line like a whisper.
The stars had dimmed as if someone were turning down a lamp in a distant room.
Dawn was coming.
Not gently, the way poets described it, but inevitably, the way executioners arrived.
He had an hour. Maybe less.
Jack rose from the bed in careful increments, distributing his weight to keep the mattress from shifting. Daisy didn’t stir.
He stood silently over her, taking in her unfathomable beauty. The dip of her hip. The impossibly delicate turn of her wrist. The way her hair spread across the pillow like spilled honey in the low amber light.
No part of him wanted to leave her, but he had responsibilities to see through. Straightening the room, he silently erased all evidence of their night. He couldn’t leave her up here alone and he’d be damned if he let her leave his bed in her current state.
He pulled out his phone, turned his back to the bed, and dialed.
The line rang twice before Vanessa picked up. “J?” Her voice was remarkably alert for a woman who’d been managing chaos since yesterday morning.
“I need something.” He kept his voice low, barely above a breath. “A dress.”
A beat of silence before she carefully clarified, “A dress?”
“Sized to tribute 1922. And flats. Something comfortable.”
The pause that followed was dense with questions she knew better than to ask. But he could hear them accumulating in the silence, stacking like cards in that shrewd mind of hers.
“I’ll have it sent within the quarter hour.”
“Leave it outside the door of my suite. Don’t knock.”
“Understood.” Another pause. “Jack?”
“Yes.”
“She’s a good one.”
He ended the call without responding.
He returned to the bed. Daisy lay on her stomach now, cheek pressed to the pillow, arms folded beneath it. The blanket barely covered her hips, the shifting light from the balcony doors traced the valley of her spine in liquid silver soon to become gold.
“Daisy.” He spoke her name the way one speaks in churches, softly, with reverence.
She stirred, murmuring something unintelligible, burrowing deeper.
He brushed a strand of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. “It’s time to wake up.”
Her lashes fluttered. A crease formed between her brows as consciousness returned in reluctant stages, and then her eyes opened, unfocused and warm with sleep. She looked up at him and smiled.
That smile.
Every single time, it detonated something in his chest. Not because it was beautiful, though it was.
Not because it was kind, though that too.
But because it was reflexive. Involuntary.
She saw his face, and her first instinct was joy, and no amount of self-loathing or logic could reconcile that with what he knew himself to be.
“Is it morning?” she murmured, voice raspy with sleep.
“Almost.” Leaning closer, he pressed his lips to hers.
She tasted like champagne and warmth and a future he hadn’t earned.
When he pulled back, her hand found his jaw, her thumb grazing the stubble there. “How much time do we have?”
“We have a little while still, but not much.”
He slid one arm beneath her knees, the other around her back, and lifted her from the bed. She made a small, startled sound, then relaxed, resting her head against his shoulder. Her bare skin was warm through his jacket and shirt.
The scent of her hair filled his lungs. He could drown in that scent and die a happy man.
“Where are we going?” she asked, the words still sleepy.
“Shower.”
He carried her into the bathroom, set a folded, heated towel on the marble vanity, and sat her down gently. Her bare legs dangled like a child’s.
She looked up at him with sleepy curiosity, her gaze tracking him as he reached into the enclosed shower and turned the taps. Water thundered against stone as steam climbed, stealing the chill from the air.
Jack turned his back to the shower and faced her with unflinching purpose. This room seemed to be a temple of truth for them, a place where they faced the wreckage and learned how to move on. Together.
He shouldered off his jacket and draped it over a hook. His fingers found the top button of his shirt, and the tremor started immediately. Not in his hands, but deeper, in a place where muscle met bone and memory lived like rot in the walls of an old house.
He knew what she’d see. Every ridge of raised tissue, every discolored patch where healing never quite completed its work.
The puckered, round cigar burns that stippled his shoulders.
The long, silvered marks that raked across his back in parallel furrows.
The claw marks and half-moons where teeth had punctured skin.
And the brand.
Two letters seared into the hollow of his hip with the permanence of a tattoo. A dead man’s autograph forever carved into ruined flesh.
She’d already seen it all. But forcing himself to show her again was like swimming against the tide with his arms and legs bound. He couldn’t control what would happen next.
Jack unfastened the second button. The third. His jaw locked, and his molars ground together as the shirt parted, revealing the undershirt beneath. He stripped it over his head without ceremony because ceremony would have given him time to reconsider.
Cool air hit his scarred torso as steam from the shower curled through the bathroom, blurring the edges of things, but not enough. Never enough.
He dropped the undershirt to the floor.
The silence that followed was a living thing. Her gaze landed on his chest, his shoulders, the terrain of damage only a tailor could disguise.
He didn’t look at her. Couldn’t. Instead, he stared at the fogged mirror behind her head and worked his belt buckle free, then the button of his trousers, then the zipper. Fabric pooled at his ankles, and he quickly kicked it away, stripping off his socks in the process.
He stood before her in nothing but his briefs.
“Jack.” Her voice was quiet and steady.
He forced himself to meet her eyes.
She didn’t flinch or try to look away. Her placid features gave nothing away as she met his stare. Even professionally trained surgeons and doctors he’d hired privately over the years struggled not to pity him. But not her.
Instead, she moved her gaze over him with the unhurried gravity of someone reading scripture.
Starting at his throat, descending across his collarbones, lingering at the burns on his shoulders.
Her eyes traced the lash marks across his ribs, followed the jagged seam of an old surgical scar beneath his left pectoral, and arrived at the brand on his hip where his briefs rode low.
Not once did she look away.
Not once did he see disgust.
What he saw was closer to recognition. As if his body were a language she’d been longing to study, and now, finally, given the unabridged text and the permission to read.
He slid the briefs down and stood naked before her.
Her chest lifted, then she exhaled, slow and trembling, but her eyes remained on his. Not dropping. Not straying. Just holding him with a steadiness that felt more intimate than any touch.
“Still…okay?”
“Yes.” She didn’t hesitate.